John Podhoretz focuses on Bush’s Patriot Act remarks.

This was an unexpected and fascinating bit of political theater. Democrats have talked themselves into believing that the president will be on the defensive to some degree this year because the situation in Iraq is not yet stable and the weapons of mass destruction have not been discovered.
But they have been speaking to an echo chamber. They have yet to take into account that the president and his people will have things to say about them – about their weird flip-flopping and the way they seemed to pick up and discard positions throughout 2003 in a desperate attempt to appeal to Democratic constituencies that seemed to have parted company with all reason.
The non-Deans may not carry his anti-war, Bush-hating, screeching-psycho baggage, but they have said a great many things and taken a great many contradictory positions they are going to have to account for.
Democrats have grown comfortable in their self-righteous denunciations of the Patriot Act because it has largely gone undefended except by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has become the liberals’ whipping boy as a result.
Their discomfort begins today.